The active solution.
The active solution. The active solution. So he was really going to fight! It was no longer possible for him to avoid it. What on earth was taking place within him? He wanted to fight; his purpose and determination to do so were firmly fixed; and yet he knew full well that, despite all the effort of his mind and all the tension of his will, he would be unable to retain even the strength necessary to take him to the place of meeting. . . . From time to time his tee t) chattered with a little dry noise. He tried to read, and took up Chateauvillard's dueling code . . . As he passed a table, he opened the case by Gastinne Renette, took out one of the pistols, and then stood as if he were about to fire, and raised his arm. But he was trembling from head to foot, and the barrel shook in all directions. Then he said to himself: 'It is impossible. I cannot fight like this!' He regarded the little hole, black and deep, at the end of the barrel, the hole that spits out death. He thought of the dishonor, of the whispered comments at the clubs, of the laughter in the salons, of the disdain of the women, . . . He continued to gaze at the weapon, and, as he raised the hammer, he saw the priming glitter beneath it like a little red flame. . . . And he experienced a confused, inexplicable joy thereat. If he did not display in the other's presence the calm and noble bearing suited to the occasion, he would be lost forever. . . . And that calm and bold bearing he could not command—he knew it, he felt it. And yet he was really brave, because he wanted to fight! He was brave, because—The thought that grazed his mind was never completed; opening his mouth wide, he suddenly thrust the barrel of the pistol into the very bottom of his throat and pressed the trigger. . . So closely does Maupassant cling to the pure psychological truth here that many readers find the marvelous little story bald and hard. There is no sympathy in it; if it leads you to feel sorry for the poor viscount, it does so by its brute facts, not by any persuasion from the author. But it is just this crystalline accuracy that makes A Coward a perfect model for students to contemplate. The phases of character expansion are as sharply limned, the one from its next, as the acts of a play. Let us see how the story would have worked out, had Maupassant neglected some phase. Suppose, first of all, that he had not told us anything definite about the viscount's immediate response to the provoking situation. Well, that would have virtually halted the telling of the tale; for it was the viscount's spontaneous resentment of the stranger's impudence that brought on the challenge. Not to tell what the viscount did would rob the story of the very incident which sets it going. This is not an accidental complication of this particular plot. It occurs in all stories of character, in greater or less degree. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that its occurrence brings the character intimately into the plot action and so makes a character story. In this case the immediate response belongs to the narrative by definition. Now suppose that Maupassant had told us all about tit, encounter in the restaurant and also about the viscount's suicide, but not a word about his wonderings and waverings, his strange access of panic, his half- crazed dreams about the outcome of his grim misadventure, his schemes to rob it of its peril. What then of the story? To answer this question, you have only to read the original, omitting the passages which sketch the reflective delay. So manipulated, the events shrink to a mere episode not a little obscure. A diner who stares at the viscount's guests is asked to mind his manners. He retorts insultingly, and the viscount slaps him. The duel is arranged, the viscount chooses his weapon and his seconds. The latter call on him, settle the details of the contest, and go. A few minutes later, his valet rushes in, alarmed by the report of a gun, and finds him dead; and beside him on the table a paper bearing only these four words: 'this is my Will'. That is a mystery story, isn't it? And an illhung one too, for it does not solve the puzzle of the viscount's suicide. What has happened, anyhow? The viscount is plainly a bold, firm man. Did he not walk straight up to the insulter in the restaurant? Did he not accept the fellow's card? Did he not insist upon the most serious form of duel? Did his seconds not find him calm? Well, then! there's something behind all this affair, something dark and wicked! Perhaps Georges Lamil was the prodigal brother of the viscount's guest, and the lady begged the viscount to break off the duel and save her family from notoriety. Perhaps the fellow was a hired assassin— or maybe the affair was all a hoax, to test the viscount's courage, and the viscount, discovering it, was humiliated. Or—but there are as many guesses as there are readers, and Everyone of them remains unsubstantiated. We shall never know whether the viscount was a hero or a coward or the victim of persecution or the butt cif a ghastly practical joke or something else. Finally, suppose that Maupassant had said nothing about the viscount's consummating deed. Suppose the story had ended at the point where the man, having picked up a pistol and aimed it across the room, found himself trembling from head to foot, and then cried: "It is impossible. I cannot fight like this!" Surely the story would now be mutilated less than in either of the preceding cases. We should at least perceive the viscount's physical cowardice, and we should conjecture that he withdrew from the duel and was disgraced thereby. But we should not be absolutely sure that he was as weak as he felt himself to be, nor that he did not walk into the duel, when the appointed hour came, no less firmly than he approached his insulter in the restaurant. And why shouldn't we? Simply because we know that a man's feelings and emotions are not the infallible weathervanes of conduce. They are peculiarly untrustworthy symptoms of bravery and cowardice. The most courageous hero, for instance, is not the man who does not know fear. Such a fellow is a dolt, whereas he who commands our admiration is the one who, being wracked with thoughts of the danger before him, nevertheless nerves himself to meet it. So too with the coward. It is not what he feels that shows him up; it is what he does after reflection. However ill the thought of an approaching duel may make him, that does not brand him. But let him dodge the consequences of the accepted challenge; let him flee not only his adversary but even the painful gossip that his behavior will bring down upon him, and there you have the finished and unmistakable type. We have sketched the elementary pattern of human conduct, but we have not indicated the source nor the nature of its perpetual novelty and immeasurable variety. A profitable study of these would carry us far beyond the purposes of this article, so I shall merely suggest a few leading facts which the writer of character stories must keep in mind. The profoundest difference between man and man appears in the balance and magnitude of forces at work during the reflective delay. In this stage of the dramatic struggle the battle is doubtless fought and won, though the victory does not appear to the observer—nor, often enough, to the man himself—until the decisive act has been consummated. Now, the palm is awarded to one of three contestants:' to impulse, to feeling, or to reason. And the particular manner in which the victorious force gains . the ascendency gives us insight into the soul of the particular man. In A Coward this three-cornered contest is beautifully clear. Consider this passage, which is typical of the entire story: "I must be firm, " he said. "He will be afraid. " (Reasoning. )The sound of his voice made him tremble, and he looked about him. (Feeling, followed by an impulse. ) He drank another glass of water, then began to undress for bed. (Impulse. ) . . . He thought: "I have all day tomorrow to arrange my affairs. I must sleep now, so that I may be calm. " (Reasoning. )Hewasvery warm under the bed clothes, but he could not manage to doze off. . . . He was still very thirsty. (Feeling. )He got up again to drink. (Impulse. )Then a disquieting thought occurred to him: "Can it be that I am afraid?" (/ Why did his heart begin to beat wildly at every familiar sound in the room? (Reasoning. ) Notice how each power tries in turn to master the viscount, and how your own interest centers about the steady, insidious onrush of the purely physical collapse and the last desperate stand which the poor man's reason makes against it. It is in just such conflicts that the character story has its being. The reader will easily observe that the three factors of this conflict resemble more or less those of the wider situation wherein reflective delay is the second phase. The immediate response is commonly rich in emotional flavor; the reflective delay itself is essentially rational, even though reason does not always win out; and the active solution is inevitably impulsive in some degree, just because it is an act of will. This parallelism is not a freak of nature; any psychologist will explain more clearly than is here possible how this circumstance is due to the very nature of the reflective delay, which is, as I have said, nothing but the arena wherein all the forces of human nature meet in combat. For us, however, the literary aspect of the fact is more significant. Briefly, it is this: The pattern, or static structure, of a character can be adequately depicted by the interplay of forces within the reflective delay. But the proof of the pattern, the full dramatic evidence of its existence and power in the particular person, appears in the active solution that follows the reflective delay. This is a very important qualification of the rule laid down above. ' And it has a bearing upon the most modern, most highly praised mode of fiction, the so-called 'psychological story'. The psychological story is one which analyzes the feelings, thoughts, and impulses of its leading characters more minutely than does the ordinary dramatic story, which is content to describe only as much as might normally appear to the eye and ear of a possible spectator. In another chapter we shall discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the analytical teclmique;2at present let us note only the danger of substituting analysis for drama. This is a very real peril today. At bottom the danger is precisely the one which we have suggested in the above inspection of Maupassant's story. It is the danger of letting the thought do duty for the deed; that is, substituting for the real course of events the hero's stream of consciousness. To explain this substitution, we must make another brief but arduous excursion into psychology. Nature is nowhere more prodigal than in mental life. She produces millions more little fish than can ever survive in the sea; and she gives birth to hundreds of millions of sensations, feelings, and imageries which can never develop and become dominant in the directing of men's lives. You become aware of this, the instant you observe accurately what is going on in your mind. Swift, evanescent, and immeasurably complex is the flux; and its items of an instant baffle the acutest introspective cataloguer. Now, this fact is, of itself, enough to prove that, when we think about a certain matter, we do not think in terms of these elusive and microscopical `mental states'. These are, on the contrary, nothing more than our manipulations in adjusting ourselves to the situation which concerns us. They bear the same relation to thinking as the tugging of a slackwire walker's muscles do to the task of keeping his balance. They are responses to the conditions of the pressing problem; they are neither the conditions nor the character which responds. The literary artist, though, is interested in the dramatic aspect of human conduct, not in the mechanism of its activity. The latter falls to the professional scientist; to the psychological expert and the physiologist. Its truthful portraiture affords no greater opportunity for fine narrative writing than does an account of the slack wire walker's muscle play. ' As Aristotle saw, the objects of the artist are always 'men in action'. But a gush of 'mental states' is no more a man in action than a series of writings is. Action may be the result of many sensations and writings; but, even then, it has a singleness, a direction, and a purpose which these, its mechanical factors, altogether lack. We are nearer to human conduct when we see Smith knock down a hoodlum who has insulted him than we are when a scientific observer enumerates to us the fifty-seven varieties of naughty thoughts which the insult sent flitting through Smith's consciousness. To be sure, we are not thus brought to an understanding of conduct, if by understanding we mean a knowledge of causes. But it is not the artist's business to furnish that. He is asked to sketch only the broad movement and trend in their decisive and illuminating manifestations The single effect, the impressive unity of somebody's behavior, is his ideal; and, to render this, he must abstain from making perceptible in the action what is imperceptible to the ordinary competent observer; and from making dramatically conspicuous what has little or no efficiency. For of just this succession of visible and crucial events does dramatic action consist. Dangerous as are most analogies between the arts, I cannot resist comparing the writings of the extreme psychological school to the Dutch microscopical paintings. Those freakish little canvases on which we see every mesh of a fly's wing and every individual hair in the down of a peach betray a confusion of science with art in their maker's mind. The correct aim of the painter The difference between scientific and artistic writing here indicated is absolute. It springs from a difference in aims. But this does not mean that scientific writing must be inartistic in the sense of being obscure and clumsy. is to present some visible aspect of some real or imaginary object. He is free to omit much that is visible, if by so doing he vivifies significantly the remainder, as Corot does with the blues and grays and Rembrandt with the browns and yellows. But he has no right to introduce the invisible. This the Dutch microscopist does though when he inserts into the scene, not what men perceive of the fly and the peach but what wing and down 'really' are. The result must have bewildered the good man, for it is singularly dead and unreal to the eye. You might fancy that Alice would have seen the like of it, had she gone through a magnifying glass instead of through the looking glass. His fly and peach are not of our world. Precisely this effect is all too easily produced in fiction by elaborately conscientious analysis of the hero's consciousness. The reader is forced to notice many minute impressions and impulses which neither mould nor advance the action at all and hence do not truly characterize, but only blur, the significance of the portrayed conduct. There is another serious misunderstanding about the so-called 'psychological story' which mars at times even the writings of veterans. I have wondered to what extent we ought to put the blame of it upon the lexicographer who defines 'psychological' as meaning 'of or pertaining to the human soul and its operations'. Certainly it is just this loose, all-inclusive notion which confuses technique. A story would, according to it, be psychological if it 'pertained' in any way to somebody's `mental states'. And so many writers fancy themselves dipping deep into the abysses of the soul when they write as follows: 'It flashed across her troubled mind', 'on his mental horizon a black doubt arose', 'a pang of regret smote him', 'the lad wondered long, weighing all the direful possibilities of his thought', and so on. Such allusions, though, do not make literature psychological. They are as powerless to do that as loud curses and piercing shrieks are powerless to make an adventure story. Curses and shrieks are merely the effects of some adventurous encounter; and, being such, they may aid in expressing its poignancy. Indicating somebody's reaction to the adventure, they come to indicate by indirection the quality of the adventure itself. They hint at a character's point of view toward the latter. And this is all that is accomplished by the mental horizons, pangs, wondering, and weighing on mental scales about which pseudo-psychological writers amplify. They tell a story by telling us how its episodes impress some witness or participant. Now, it often happens that the episodes themselves are no more psychological than a thunderstorm or the flight of a bird. The hero may be caught in a jam on the Subway, or the heroine be spattered with mud by a passing automobile. Furthermore, it may be that the crowd of travelers or the racing chauffeur figures in the action of the story, while the hero's sensations and the heroine's thoughts do not. In such a case, the reader's attention need not be drawn to these mental states, except insofar as they alone can make clear the relevant happenings. The genuine psychological story uses 'mental states' in a different way. They are not its language; they are its subject matter. The working of some human trait is depicted, as any simple adventure or love affair might be. Maupassant's A Piece of . String, Henry James' The Liar, and Mrs. Wharton's The Daunt Diana typify this undertaking. The first shows us, in their tragic interaction, the deeds of an over-shrewd miser who cherishes his reputation and of his neighbors who deal lightly with it. The second portrays an incorrigible drawer of the long bow. The third exhibits the acquisitive passion and its paradoxical end. Such material seldom demands the false psychological manner; its narrative can flow along as objectively as a newspaper report, and so it often does. Unfortunately, though, it often does not; and its failure is nowhere more conspicuous than in some of Howells' stories. Howells analyzes human nature's milder moods and appetites with sympathetic accuracy; and when he does, he produces a sincere, convincing psychological story, albeit generally a tame one. But, unfortunately, he has associated the psychological manner and language with whatever material he writes about; and when the latter is not psychological, the resulting narrative suffers. The opening of A Circle in the Water mingles the psychological manner with the psychological material. The former appears at the very outset: The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward that dreary November sunset. Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. . . The phrases of this passage which I have italicized do not describe the scene directly, nor do they turn us toward some other part of the story proper. They help to give us a distinct feeling for the mildly dreary autumnal hour, by telling us that somebody was contemplating the sunset, and what he felt. The narrator's reminiscences and emotions are of no account in the drama; they merely assist —or are supposed to assist—in lighting up the stage. Notice how easily we may cut them out. Smoothing over the gaps, we get something like this: The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless trees to the westward, and gave their outline a black definition. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose of a dying day in the dying year; and the impersonal melancholy of it weighed me down as I dragged myself through the November woods. Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking; a cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky. There was more of the day left than the crimson glare in the west betrayed . . . etc. Let the student ask himself whether, in this briefer, purely objective report, any feature of the original scene has gone lost. I think he will find none missing; and if he does, it is through my faulty abridging and not be cause of the changed point of view. The truth is, very few events that are visible or audible can be made known to readers more vividly through the reporter's 'mental states' than by means of the bald, common, and obvious qualities, manners and consequences of the objective items themselves. Indeed, the 'mental state' geRgrally turns out to be a pure redundancy, as it is in the above passage. When Howells says that in the sunset there was the repose which we feel in a dying day, the allusion to the" feeling is gratuitous. For everybody knows that repose is something which we feel; and to mention the fact in finished prose is pretty much like saying 'the color red which we see in the rose', when one means 'the red of the rose' or `rose-red'. Or, again, to say: 'I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought', when the fact of perceiving makes no difference to the story, is not only less elegant, but less true dramatically than to say: 'It was not so late as I had thought. ' Such psychological mannerisms only divert the reader from the plot to the narrator, and to that extent falsify the total impression. ' Not so, however, with the genuine psychological narrative whose material is, both by intent and by full dramatic right, the world of 'mental states'. When the narrator of Howells' story flings himself down 'on one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre' and muses over the mysterious antiquity of the place, he sees not the slight. est impulse `of the life that the thing inarticulately recorded. ' I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends, and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends. . . . Was evil then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts, zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking, except when we are talking. . . 1 The first italicized clause in the opening of A Circle in the Water (117) may seem far removed from a psychological mannerism. To compare the outline of autumnal trees to the effects achieved some years ago by certain French painters is, one might insist, a sober historical allusion. But I would urge that it is this only in appearance. Really it is a private reminiscence, as obscure as it is private. It is a random association, and the pictures which the landscape suggested to the author havee. exeraier seen nor rce heard of The compartson Tii'ffie-ie ore meanin ess - -r-—g 1"-9i to most 0 . -- ;it is as though Howells had written: "The z-, . . „ 0 4. c. 4ttik sunset . . . gave their outline a black definition which awoke in me t i , , . , the memory of something done by a French school . . . etc". C. _- Thus revised, the psychological mannerism of it protrudes. „, I  . s These reflections and the peculiar flicker of mind that accompany them are dramatically perfect. They are not dragged in to describe something else. They are made known for their own sake and because they count in the story. It is this very doubt about the permanence of the good and the transiency of evil which is going to work itself out in the encounter with Tedham. Indeed, to the careful reader, it appears the deeper, more universal topic, of which Tedham's adventures are only a dramatic exemplification. The difference, therefore, between it and the 'I thought's', 'I felt's', and 'I perceived's' of the first quoted passage is not one of degree; it is a difference of logical and dramatic kind. Never can the one be reduced to the other.